The Guest of Quesnay eBook

Every event, no matter how trifling, in this man’s
pitiful career had been recorded in the American newspapers
with an elaboration which, for my part, I found infuriatingly
tiresome. I have lived in Paris so long that
I am afraid to go home: I have too little to show
for my years of pottering with paint and canvas, and
I have grown timid about all the changes that have
crept in at home. I do not know the “new
men,” I do not know how they would use me, and
fear they might make no place for me; and so I fit
myself more closely into the little grooves I have
worn for myself, and resign myself to stay. But
I am no “expatriate.” I know there
is a feeling at home against us who remain over here
to do our work, but in most instances it is a prejudice
which springs from a misunderstanding. I think
the quality of patriotism in those of us who “didn’t
go home in time” is almost pathetically deep
and real, and, like many another oldish fellow in
my position, I try to keep as close to things at home
as I can. All of my old friends gradually ceased
to write to me, but I still take three home newspapers,
trying to follow the people I knew and the things
that happen; and the ubiquity of so worthless a creature
as Larrabee Harman in the columns I dredged for real
news had long been a point of irritation to this present
exile. Not only that: he had usurped space
in the Continental papers, and of late my favourite
Parisian journal had served him to me with my morning
coffee, only hinting his name, but offering him with
that gracious satire characteristic of the Gallic
journalist writing of anything American. And
so this grotesque wreck of a man was well known to
the boulevard—­one of its sights. That
was to be perceived by the flutter he caused, by the
turning of heads in his direction, and the low laughter
of the people at the little tables. Three or four
in the rear ranks had risen to their feet to get a
better look at him and his companion.

Some one behind us chuckled aloud. “They
say Mariana beats him.”

“Evidently!”

The dancer was aware of the flutter, and called Harman’s
attention to it with a touch upon his arm and a laugh
and a nod of her violent plumage.

At that he seemed to rouse himself somewhat:
his head rolled heavily over upon his shoulder, the
lids lifted a little from the red-shot eyes, showing
a strange pride when his gaze fell upon the many staring
faces.

Then, as the procession moved again and the white
automobile with it, the sottish mouth widened in a
smile of dull and cynical contempt: the look
of a half-poisoned Augustan borne down through the
crowds from the Palatine after supping with Caligula.

Ward pulled my sleeve.

“Come,” he said, “let us go over
to the Luxembourg gardens where the air is cleaner.”

CHAPTER II

Ward is a portrait-painter, and in the matter of vogue
there seem to be no pinnacles left for him to surmount.
I think he has painted most of the very rich women
of fashion who have come to Paris of late years, and
he has become so prosperous, has such a polite celebrity,
and his opinions upon art are so conclusively quoted,
that the friendship of some of us who started with
him has been dangerously strained.